


the children of xerxes

by chadsuke



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-07-18 13:07:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16119113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chadsuke/pseuds/chadsuke
Summary: they are of the desert, and the desert is of them - the last of a fallen kingdom, the children of history.whispers cloak their souls and red dogs their footsteps.four and yet as countless as the grains of sand.she breathes "no," and the world shifts.





	1. Prologue

It has not yet been a year when he tells her.

Trisha is the one who brings it up – Hohenheim does not say anything. “Van,” she says, for she is the only one who has ever called him that in his countless years of walking the earth, he does not call himself that nor do any of the myriad of souls within, “I’ve seen the pictures Pinako has of you two.”

He sucks in a breath, short and frightened, and pretends his hands aren’t trembling as he stares at the words in his book. He hadn’t thought- The pictures- “Van,” Trisha says again, and she takes the book from his shaking hands, tucking a bookmark in place and setting it to the side. She stares at him intently, with those brown eyes he loves more than anything else in this world. “What are you?”

Hohenheim cannot lie to her. She is too good, matters too much, he cannot-

And so he tells her everything.

He tells her of a place called Xerxes, long lost among the annals of history and the sands and the wind – he tells her of trusting someone he should not have, trusting the Dwarf in the Flask- He speaks of the King and of the people of Xing and travelling among the Ishvalans. He tells her of the plan, of the Promised Day, of what someday the Dwarf plans to do to this country, and he tells her-

He tells her of all the souls within him, all the beings that make up every inch and how it is not just Hohenheim in this body, how it is so many, how he is no longer human and he will not age, and he-

She kisses him.

It’s a simple, sweet thing, a press of lips against lips, and Trisha draws back with a small smile. “Alright,” she says, very softly. “You’ll have to introduce me to everyone else in there, you know.”

Hohenheim stares at her helplessly.

“There are 563,329 other souls,” he says, because he has no idea what else there is to _say_ , and Trisha stares at him for a moment, mouth working soundlessly, before she shakes her head.

“Then I guess we’d better get started,” she says, and Hohenheim falls in love with her all over again.

* * *

He does, as time goes on, tell her of the souls.

Of a woman named Livia who is insistent he scrubs the dishes the wrong way. A man named Timo who thinks Trisha is absolutely beautiful and is certainly a key co-writer behind some of the few verses of poetry Hohenheim dedicates to his love. A child named Jana who is the reason he comes home with a pink stuffed bear she had insisted he get from the store.

Trisha laughs and laughs until she’s sick and then the bear gets a special spot on their mantle.

She asks, when she kisses him, if it is alright. “You have so many within you,” Trisha says, and her brow is knit, her eyes folded in concern. “If we…”

His heart chokes, stutters at her words, and Hohenheim feels young again, young like he has not been in so long as he reaches out to cup her cheek. “We may,” he says, and he tries to find the words. “It is not…” It is not _equal,_ it is not necessarily them sharing his eyes, it is a partnership that ebbs and flows and if he wants to be the only one who sees, only one who feels, it can be so. “We may,” he says again, helplessly, and she laughs and he drowns in her embrace that night.

* * *

She throws up one morning and Hohenheim is terrified. Trisha is hearty and hale. She spends all day in the sun, sinking dark brown hands into the dirt and taking good care of every plant as if they were her own blood, her own child. The flowers bloom beautifully around the house. The vegetable garden gives much of what they eat upon the table – the fruit garden and the trees are always so ripe. She works hard, steadily, and never falters and it seems like she is a vision that will last forever, just the same.

But she throws up one morning, and Hohenheim is terrified.

Trisha laughs at him. “Van, you’re ridiculous,” she says. “Something just didn’t agree with me, that’s all. It’s not a big deal.”

But she throws up the next morning, too. And the next.

He’s ready to reach within her, ready to try to fix whatever can be done but Trisha knows him too well and levels a steely glare upon him. “Van Hohenheim,” she says, firm as firm can be. “If you’re worried, I’ll go see the Rockbells tomorrow. But _you_ will do _nothing_. Understand?”

“Yes,” he says, so very softly, and he leaves to go chop wood for a few hours because they _need_ it, not because he’s sulking or anything.

She goes the next day, to walk down the road to see Yuriy and Sara, and comes back about 1 hour and 15 minutes later with a huge grin on her face.

Hohenheim puts down the book he’s been pretending to read for the entire time she’s gone and trips and stumbles off the porch in his hurry to meet her. He picks himself up as if he has never fallen and runs to her, catches her in his arms and searches her face for information, for the news, for what she has been told. “You’re alright?” he asks her, because surely she would not be smiling this way if she were not, and Trisha laughs.

“I’m more than alright,” she tells him, and there’s a glint to her eyes that usually signals Hohenheim is about to have a heart attack over this woman. “Van, I’m pregnant.”

Everything drops away and he stares at her, because the world is _ending._ “Trisha,” he says. “You- You can’t be pregnant.”

She snorts. “Well, I am. Unfortunately or fortunately, I am pregnant and it’s your child, Van.”

She’s- Trisha is _pregnant_ and it’s _his child_ and he’s going to be a _father-_

Hohenheim sits down, heavily, and ignores the well of congratulations that come from within, tries to shut out the happy hum of thousands of souls. He’s going to be… She kneels in front of him and presses a kiss to his forehead. “Van,” she says, and he searches her face for answers, for the truth, for anything to ground him, “It’s going to be alright.”

And somehow, it is.

* * *

The toys that Jana and so many other children within him have clamored for him to make or buy finally have a purpose. The room that was once Trisha’s parents has been converted into a child’s bedroom, and Trisha grows bigger and rounder and fatter by the day.

He presses his head to her stomach and swears he can feel the beat of a heart, swears he can hear his child’s life slowly puttering into being and it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard, and some nights he paces the porch while Trisha sleeps and weeps into his hand, because he has done and is so many terrible things and no child deserves that, no one deserves to have a creature like him as a father.

Trisha finds him like this, one of these nights, finds him weeping on the porch as he shakes and she sits right next to him and doesn’t say a word.

“What if… what it’s catching?” he whispers his worst fears aloud, stares into the darkness of the countryside. “What if they’re monsters like me? If they’re not human?” He quells the clamor within, quells the uprising of souls that yell at him that scold him that chastise because there are other souls that _agree_ , others that worry and fret and so he is divided.

“You’re not a monster,” Trisha says. “And if you are, then I’ll love my monstrous children.” She turns to him, and Hohenheim is alarmed by the sight of tears in her eyes. “Please, Van. I’m… scared, too.”

Trisha always seems so resilient. She seems as though she could weather the strongest storm in the world and it would bow before her, that she could walk up to the Fuhrer and he would grant her an audience in a heartbeat, and it’s so… it’s both terrifying and an eye-opener to see that she, too, is scared.

She, too, is imperfect.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, because he cannot act as though he’s the only one new to this, as though he is the only one scared, and he wraps his arms around her and she cries into his shoulder.

* * *

Trisha is so round now that she spends most of her days sitting. Her ankles are swollen and her stomach is heavy and Hohenheim rubs her shoulders until she leans into him with a groan of relief. Sara Rockbell has recently had her child, and Hohenheim welcomes the practice at holding the babe but he’s still too… too skittish to do too much, to try too much.

Pinako laughs herself sick at him and then takes her grandchild from his arms.

His love tilts her head back and looks up at him. “Van,” she says, and he makes a questioning noise but continues at her shoulders. “You will tell them about Xerxes, right?”

He stops.

His hands quiver on her shoulders, and he pulls them back, wraps his never aging hands around each other and squeezes. She sits upright, now, and turns around, her gaze strong and steady. “You don’t need to tell them everything, not until they’re older, but they should know where they come from, Van. They need to know their heritage.”

Hohenheim is helpless before her, and it takes him minutes before he is able to form the right and proper words. “Trisha,” he says, and oh does he _plead._ “They can’t know about your family? About your heritage?”

She shakes her head. “I’ll pass down my family traditions,” she tells him. “The best sweets for giving, the placement of my father’s flowers and every meaning behind them, the story of the raven my mother told me almost every night before bed because it was my favorite, everything.” Her brown eyes are the most beautiful sight he has seen, fixed on him in that way. “But you also need to share yours. They are of Xerxes, too, and they deserve to know.”

He cannot imagine telling them. Telling his child of the land that exists only within him and within one other – few remember its existence, few know the ruins lay partially buried in the sands. Hohenheim cannot, especially, think of telling them of the homunculi, of the Dwarf, of the Promised Day and what is to be done with this country – he cannot. He… he cannot.

But he bows his head. “I will try,” he says. “I… I will try to share with them.”

Trisha hmms, but she accepts it, playing a kiss upon his hair. “Alright,” she says. “And when you go to stop everything, you’ll take us with you, won’t you?”

Hohenheim’s heart _stops._

He jerks his head upward, staring into her startled eyes and tries to form words – he cannot. Every moment with her robs him of his ability to articulate and were he a lesser man he would hate her for it but he could never, ever do that. He takes her dark hands in his own and bends to press his forehead to her knuckles and he _shakes._ “Please,” he begs, “Do not make me promise this. I… I could not take you, I-“

The thought of exposing his love and his child to a part of him that he wishes to hide, especially now that it is not only Trisha deep within his heart but the unborn life in her stomach, it is- it is _so much._

“I will,” says Trisha, and she pulls her hands back and he stares up at her. She is beautiful and kind and everything in his world, even when she is forcing from him a promise he does not want to make. “Promise me, Van. When you go to save Amestris, you will take us with you.”

She is the one person he can never say no to, and he leans in and kisses her, leans over the edge of the chair and presses a kiss to her lips and then buries his face in her shoulder. “I promise,” he breathes, and every soul within him breathes too. “You will go with me when I leave.”

“We’ll stop this together,” says Trisha, and she kisses him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you ever get a fanfic that you get an idea for and you need to write immediately because you're that excited about it?
> 
> yeah. yeah. this is that fic. IM SO excited.
> 
> (also this is the most pretentious summary i have EVER written for a fanfic but i dont care)


	2. Chapter 1

Trisha giving birth is the most terrifying moment in Hohenheim’s life. And that is saying something – his life in Xerxes, long ago, was fraught with terror and horrible things and yet- yet-

Then, he had no one he truly cared to lose. Here, he is terrified. He holds the Rockbells’ young child in his arms while Pinako sits beside him, and every yell from his love makes him tremble. “She’ll be fine,” Pinako tells him, giving him a smile. She’s small, old – he remembers when they were the same height, when she would arm wrestle him for the last beer and always win. She’s never asked him why he’s exactly the same, almost fifty years later.

“You don’t know that for _certain_ -“ he starts to say, but the tremble of his arms upsets the child and in an attempt to make them not fuss, he forcibly stops. There’s the crying of a _child_ that splits through the air, the sound of a wailing infant, and his heart stutters to a stop as it starts to peter out. Oh, no, oh no, oh no-

Sara flings open the door, sweat beading on her forehead… and smiles. “She’s alright. Come on in – meet your kid.”

She takes her own child from his arms, for which Hohenheim is grateful, and he slips by her. Trisha looks _exhausted_ , and he had wanted to be with her, but he had shortly been kicked out because “All your worrying is making me worry too, Van!”

Trisha smiles at him now, though, and he sinks into the seat right next to the bed. “You’re fine?” he asks, because he loves her as much as a single man can love, and she nods. “And… and the baby?”

She’s holding a bundle in her arms, a small infant swaddled in cloth, and her smile only grows. “Look,” she says, and Trisha turns the babe towards him.

Light hair – too damp to determine the color, just yet. Dark skin, like both Hohenheim and Trisha – the color of the desert. The babe yawns, opening their eyes just a fraction, and his child’s eyes are _gold._ A child of Xerxes, bundled in Trisha’s arms, and Hohenheim can’t breathe. “Beautiful,” he says, because that’s all he can say.

* * *

“You’ve had four hundred years more sleep,” Trisha tells him. “You’re the parent at nighttime.”

So whenever the baby cries, Hohenheim is the one who pulls himself out of bed, pads down the hall, and takes the child from the crib. He holds the angel close, holds this child of the desert against his chest and goes outside. Maybe it’s confusing, maybe it will mix them up when they’re older (he doesn’t know how this language development stuff works) – but when it’s just the two of them on the porch, just father and child staring up at the stars in the sky, Hohenheim speaks to them in Xerxesian.

 _“Ssh, don’t cry,_ ” he murmurs in the language that only one other alive can still speak. _“Daddy’s here, I’ve got you…_ ”

He paces the porch, humming an ancient tune under his breath that always soothes them, and kisses their brow, breathing their name – drawn from Xerxes, their ancient name of the desert – and then kissing their nose. _“Go to sleep, little one,_ ” he whispers, and they do.

* * *

Trisha grows round and fat with another child, but she’s better prepared this time. She gardens, hobbling around on swollen ankles still as she tends to her plants, and Hohenheim is the one who ends up watching the child.

Well- children. He’s found the Rockbells’ child foisted off on him as well, and he transmutes a carrier. One infant on the front – one infant on the back.

(Pinako laughs herself sick at him. Again. She seems to be eternally mocking him and he regrets every befriending her.)

He tries not to attract too much attention, though, and does not wander into town that often. Resembool is a military town, or growing into one, with soldiers consistently passing through and some setting up camp in an old office building that’s quickly being transformed into a military base, and Hohenheim _knows_ who is being the government. He has his suspicions about the Fuhrer, as well – and any one of these soldiers could be directly working for them, could be in the know. (Probably not too many, but it does only take one.)

Hohenheim is so very clearly a child of the desert – so very clearly of Xerxes to those who know what to look for. So is his child, asleep on his back (or screaming – they have a very strong set of lungs). The Rockbell child is not, for which he is grateful – they will not attract attention in that way. Trisha is also a child of the desert, which is dangerous in these times for the whispers of unsettlement rock the nearby Ishval, but she is not Ishvalan and she is not Xerxesian, and while people may whisper nothing will be done.

He still does not like watching his pregnant love hobble down to go shopping, as she must every time a new batch of soldiers has come to Resembool, because Hohenheim does not want them to be _found._

If it was just him, he would not be frightened. But now he has one child, almost two, and he will not let anyone take them from him.

* * *

It’s only a month after their first child’s first birthday that the second child is born. Golden hair, golden eyes, skin of the desert – another child of Xerxes.

(Hohenheim has nightmares – nightmares of his two children with their Xerxesian hair and Xerxesian eyes and Xerxesian names getting swept up into that ancient transmutation circle and he snaps awake and goes to the porch and _weeps._ )

They crawl and they toddle and they walk and they babble. The eldest happily chirps “Dada!” and clings to Hohenheim’s leg and he scoops them up and buries his face in their chest to hide his tears while they giggle. He loves them – loves them oh so much, even if he sits down and talks with Trisha because he really doesn’t think he could handle a third child and she just laughs at him.

And then war breaks out.

A soldier shoots an Ishvalan child and the region to the east erupts into a civil war that threatens to leak out and swallow everything around it. Ishval has always been rocky, tumultuous, never quite agreeing with the government of Amestris (a fact which he does not blame them for), but outright _war…_

It is frightening.

Their oldest is safely in bed and Hohenheim is soothing their youngest when Trisha approaches him, concern written on her face. “Van,” she says, “Do you think Ishval has anything to do with the Dwarf?”

Hohenheim stills. He looks at his love, and tries to remember to breathe. “What?”

Trisha is smart. Intelligent. The love of his life and while she is no alchemist, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t understand what he tells her. She offers him a map of Amestris, and he trades her their child to take it and spread it out on the table in front of him. “Could you draw the circle for me, please?”

He doesn’t want to.

Telling his love of everything is one thing, even traveling with her to set up his counter circle – but drawing this, actively engaging her in this… there is no going back. She will be a part of this, truly, part of the planning and the offense and he knows that she will be killed if she reveals she knows anything.

Hohenheim can never, ever say no to Trisha – he draws the circle.

It’s easy to see the points of it, this way. To see how Riviere is a point, still blood soaked from all those years ago, how Fisk and Wellsley have long been planned, to see how Ishval is, indeed, a point on the map, as is Trisha’s birthplace of Liore. “They’re killing the Ishvalans for the transmutation,” Hohenheim confirms, and his love closes her eyes in sorrow.

“Is there… is there nothing we can _do_?” she asks, and Hohenheim shakes his head.

“They won’t stop until it is covered in blood,” he says. “We can’t stop that – we won’t be able to.”

“Oh,” she says, oh so softly.

* * *

The thought plagues him for the next week, two weeks. He is distracted. Trisha is the one who put this into his head and now he cannot get it _out._

Because perhaps he cannot save everyone – perhaps he cannot stem the tide of blood, cannot stop Ishval from being yet another point on the transmutation circle that will doom everyone in this nation. But that does not mean he cannot save _anyone._

He stands on the porch in the dead of night and stares up at the stars and Trisha approaches from behind, wraps her arms around his arm and leans into him. “You’re leaving, aren’t you,” she says, and Hohenheim remembers his promise with a sudden pang of guilt.

“No,” he says. “I can’t- the children are too young to travel, Trisha.”

She’s quiet for a moment, thinking. “You can go without us,” she says, her words long mulled over, clearly long thought out. “It’s okay. Just come back – or we’ll catch up to you, when they’re older.”

He looks at her and he is both despairing and helpless before her. “Are you sure?” he asks.

Trisha smiles. “Yes. Go. We’ll find you again.”

* * *

Hohenheim waits until his youngest’s first birthday until he leaves.

Waits until a week after that, after all the excitement from “Turning one!!” wears off, and then bends before his children and holds them close.

“I have to go,” he tells them, and he sees the light of incomprehension in their eyes, knows that no matter how he explains this they won’t understand that he’s going to walk out this door and not come back for quite a long time. “People are in trouble,” he says, “And I’ve got to go help them.”

“Okay,” says his oldest, wrapping their arms around his neck and squeezing.

“Okay,” says his youngest, mimicking their elder sibling, and Hohenheim squeezes his children right back, oh so gentle, before letting go, standing up, and turning to his love.

“Come home safe,” Trisha says, with a gentle smile. “Or we’ll come find you.”

The thought of them wandering into the wartorn Ishval looking for him frightens him, so he simply embraces her, kissing her and then pulls away. Tears are welling up in his eyes, he knows, and he turns so he can try to hide them. “Good-bye,” he says, and he steps out the door.

He has a long way to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i said in the first chapter the family travelling together - that will still happen, don't worry.
> 
> but for now... hohenheim goes it alone.


	3. Chapter 2

Trisha is a daughter of the desert.

It thrums in her blood, echoes in her every step – she may not live among the sands, now, but it doesn’t mean that they have forgotten her or that she has forgotten them. She fell in love with Van, with the desert inside him, and her two children have never seen the desert yet they are of it.

One day, she will take them back to it, and they will know it as she does.

She sits on the back porch, watching her children tussle and play and wrestle as young children do. The younger darts away screaming and the older laughs and follows, sibling chasing sibling. She’s tired, so very tired, moreso lately than she’s been in a long time, and Trisha wonders if she really can do this on her own. Can she really raise two children by herself? Can she?

Trisha closes her eyes, breathes, counts to ten. She misses him with an ache that burns within her. He had called from the last train station he had been at, called and let both of their children babble over the phone to him, so excited to tell their father about their day and to hear how he is being a ‘hero’, and Trisha could hear his voice rough with tears. He always tries to hide it.

But there are no working phones in Ishval, nowadays, and there are so many soldiers in Resembool.

They go to kill her brothers and sisters, those from the desert as she is, but so many of them are young. Forced into this without any will of their own, and she sees the pinched fear in many young faces, knowing that so many will never return.

(But they’re being sent out to murder, to slaughter the defenseless and kill children and it’s so hard to feel any drop of sympathy for them.)

There’s a scream that’s less of laughter and more of hurt, and Trisha’s eyes snap open. Her youngest has fallen, and she moves quickly to her children’s sides.

“H-Hurts,” her youngest babbles, tears rising in golden eyes, and she makes sympathetic noises as she sees the source. A skinned knee, and oh, does that hurt a little one.

“Sssh, I’ll put a bandage on it,” she reassures her child, even though it doesn’t need one, because something like that always makes young ones feel better.

“Y-Yeah!” her oldest chimes in, and watches with wide eyes as Trisha presses a careful bandage over the ‘wound’. The tears are gone, oh-so-fast, and it’s only a few minutes before they’re up and playing, up and roughhousing.

Trisha watches them wrestle and wishes Van were here.

* * *

They go to play at the Rockbells, like they always do, and Pinako is showing the kids some automail when Sara takes her hand, pulls her aside. “Trisha,” Sara says seriously. “A man came around asking about you.”

Trisha’s breath catches in her throat and she stares at her friend with wide brown eyes. “About… me? What do you mean?”

Sara glances at the kids, makes sure they’re enthralled and not listening to a word, and continues. “He was asking about your kids’ birth records. We fill and submit all the ones ‘round here, but you asked us not to with yours, so we didn’t. He asked and I told him I had no idea what he was talking about and slammed the door in his face.” She shakes her head. “But I thought you’d like t’know.”

In another world- In another world, where Trisha did not know everything, she would not have thought twice. She would have had the Rockbells fill out a birth record with Amestrian or Liorian names, sent it off to the government, done it like normal procedure and not thought twice about it. But- But after what Van had _said…_

There are no official documents on the existence of her children. They do not attend school, like how the newest Rockbell will soon enough. There are no birth records. There is nothing legal about them existing, nor anything legal about her knowing Van. Her children are ghosts, and she’s terrified for them.

“Did he look military?” she asks, hushed, and Sara looks surprised.

“I don’t know, he wasn’t in a uniform…” She furrows her brow. “Trish, what kind of trouble are you in? You think the _military_ wants your kids’ records?”

Trisha hesitates for a long, long moment and weighs her options.

“Tonight,” she tells her. “When the kids are in bed, I’ll tell all of you tonight.”

* * *

She runs back over to the house to gather up her things before dinner, and when all the kids are tucked away safely in bed (very excited for a sleepover), the four adults sit down at the dinner table. Trisha spreads out the map and the Rockbells peer over it.

“That’s some kind of alchemy, isn’t it?” Pinako asks, and Trisha isn’t surprised she recognizes that sort of thing. She and Van have been friends a long time, haven’t they?

Trisha nods. “It is.” She looks at all three of them seriously, from Sara to Pinako to Yuriy. She needs to impress upon them the gravity of what she is going to tell them. How important this is. “Listen to me. You cannot tell what I’m sharing with you to _anyone._ If people know that you know this… you’ll die.”

She half wants them to turn away now. Half wants them to look back at the room with their sleeping child and decide that this is too much, this is too dangerous, and have her not speak another word.

Is this what Van felt?

But though their faces are ashen, are grave, not a single one of them moves away. Yuriy sets a hand on her shoulder. “Trisha,” he says softly. “You can trust us.”

“I know,” she tells him, tells them all, and she bows her head. “I’m sorry.”

And she tells them everything.

Of course, she’s a little more concise than Van would be – there are details not relevant to them, ones that are relevant to Van and thus to her because he is the love of her life, but she tells them everything. From Xerxes to the homunculi to the Dwarf to the circle arrayed before them, she tells them every scrap of information she has. “That’s why I didn’t want you to create birth records,” Trisha says, shaking her head. “I don’t want anyone to know they exist.”

Sara nods, understanding albeit shaken, and Yuriy spreads his palm over the edge of the map. “Ishval,” he says slowly. “Is that why Hohenheim went there?”

“He knows he won’t be able to stop it but… he wants to help.”

Pinako regards her seriously. “Are you going?”

It’s not surprising she’s seen through her like this, and it turns out Trisha is the one to cast a hesitant glance back at the room with the sleeping children and then lean forwards, slumping in her seat just a touch. “I wanted to wait until they were older,” she says. “They’re so young, and Ishval’s dangerous, but… if people are looking, we _need_ to go.”

What a frightening thought. Charging into Ishval, looking for Van, because Resembool – Resembool!! – is so unsafe.

Sara hesitates, too, exchanging a glance with her husband, and when she nods Sara looks back at her. “Trisha, Yuriy and I… we were planning on going to Ishval.”

“What?” She can’t believe her ears.

“They need doctors,” Sara continues, and Trisha doesn’t think she’ll ever look at her friend the same away again, not after she so bravely talks of walking into that warzone without a waver in her voice. Van is brave – but Van is not entirely human. Sara and Yuriy very much are, and they look to her without any hesitation, with nothing but resolution in their eyes. “You can travel with us, if you want. Safety in numbers.”

The idea takes her aback. Going to find Van in Ishval… it was a faraway thought that had only risen to her mind today. She planned on finding him once the children were older, teenagers maybe, if he hadn’t returned home yet or told her to come. But with them being so young… No, she hadn’t considered it until Sara had told her someone was looking and her heart had risen in her throat.

But now it’s so very, vividly real.

Trisha swallows sharply, mouth dry. “When were you planning on leaving?” she asks.

“A month,” Yuriy says. “But…” He glances at Sara, and she nods – they communicate without words, and Trisha misses that, misses that bond with Van so fiercely. “We can push it sooner if you want.”

A month…

She doesn’t know if she can do a month. Already, she frets over the man returning, over whoever it is coming back. It’s unlikely it’s just a coincidence, someone investigating why she does not bring her children to town now that the soldiers have taken up there, someone looking into why there are no records-

No. Trisha would be so surprised if it were such a simple matter.

“…Two weeks?” She asks quietly.

Sara looks at Yuriy, who shrugs and half-nods. “Alright,” she says. “We can do two weeks.”

* * *

She doesn’t tell the children for a week. She lets them tumble over each other and laugh and run and be like normal children – meanwhile, Trisha prepares. She dries fruit and makes vegetable chips and carefully scours her cupboards for anything that will last and packs that away – all the fresh food, all that will not last is what she makes and what she feeds them.

Trisha digs up the old carrier that Van had used with the little ones when they were but infants, and each night she works on it, adds some fabric and stretches it a little bit more.

When it’s only one week from them departing, she sits both of the children down. “We’re going to go see Daddy,” she tells them, and they light up. “But I need both of you to listen to me, okay?”

She ruffles their hair, gives them a smile, and then grows serious. “A lot of people don’t like… people like us.”

Her oldest frowns. “People like us?”

“Where are we from?”

“’esert!” her youngest answers promptly, and she rewards that with a boop on the nose.

“That’s right. The desert. Lots of people here in Amestris don’t like the desert, and the people from it. That’s why Daddy went away – to help the people in Ishval. They’re desert people, too, and the military’s being… bad to them.”

“The military’s bad!”

She boops her oldest on the nose as well and nods. “We have to be careful with them, okay? So I need you two to pick out names. I want you to look at all the books we have and pick out names for the two of you and they’ll be your secret pretend Amestrian names.”

Golden eyes light up and Trisha watches with amusement as her two children start to rifle eagerly through texts.

* * *

Sara laughs when she tells her and Yuriy lifts an eyebrow. “Are they sure?” he asks.

Trisha can’t help her amused smile and she shrugs. “Yes. I asked, and apparently they like the shortness. They’re strange, maybe, but if they want to change it later on they can.”

Sara returns the smile. “How old were you when you picked out the name Trisha?”

“I don’t remember how old… But it was made official when I was ten.” She shakes her head. "Don't worry - I'm really sure they'll change their mind before then, and we'll be calling them something else for the rest of their lives."

Her smile wavers a little bit on her face. "Well, at least I hope so."

 

* * *

Yuriy is kind enough to carry her bag as well – while Sara holds her own bag and one full of medical supplies. Her oldest is on her back, already kicking merrily away, with her youngest curled up on her front.

She can’t help but shake her head fondly. She should remember what to properly call them, now. Trisha needs to remember to always call them by their Amestrian names, never anything else.

 _Ba_ on her back and _Be_ on her front. Barium and Beryllium. Ba had wanted the two of them to match names, and there weren’t many options that matched and were both vaguely pronounceable. (She absolutely talked them down from some even MORE ridiculous ones. No, sorry Ba, she's not calling you 'Sb' for the next few years.)

What kind of daughters does she have, that they name themselves after elements? Alchemists, through and through.

Van’s to blame, of course.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some of you noticed the deliberate way these kiddos were referred to in the last chapter... no one quite hit the mark, though some got half of it!
> 
> anyway, thank you for your patience on this. this one is dedicated to you, cole, who so very much wanted the next chapter! im sorry to keep you waiting for so long lmao.


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